


something in the way you're looking through my eyes

by botticellis (itomorian)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Blood and Gore, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Torture, Implied/Referenced Violence, M/M, Murder, Negative Thoughts, Non-Chronological, Non-Linear Narrative, Slasher, Small Towns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:27:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26895184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itomorian/pseuds/botticellis
Summary: jeno is in too deep.he might just sink, and drown, and die.
Relationships: Lee Jeno/Zhong Chen Le
Comments: 18
Kudos: 23
Collections: Challenge #2 — tricks; treats; and terrors





	something in the way you're looking through my eyes

**Author's Note:**

> please HEED THE TAGS!!!!
> 
> title is from teeth by 5 seconds of summer
> 
> thank you so much lw mods for this opportunity !!! <333
> 
> uhhhh started making it, had a breakdown. bon appetit.

> _behind your childlike innocent face_
> 
> _a frightening side of you, gives me goose bumps_
> 
> _taemin ~ criminal_

_lachesism / vemödalen_

  
  


Not everyone wanted to be struck by lightning until they turned into a charred mass of flesh or lost a limb. 

Not everyone wanted to lose everything that their life consisted of in a fire, to survive a plane crash, or to plunge headfirst into a deep waterfall.

Or have such a horrific accident befall them that it would warp an arc of their reality in such a crooked manner that there will, from then onwards, be a part of their life so hardened because of its forging from peripeteia, that it would forever be so much more than just one smooth string connecting two different, consecutive moments of someone's existence.

Not everyone wanted to be both: the tragic hero falling from grace, and the phoenix rising from its ashes — stronger than before — hardened through horrifying happenstance.

He doesn't much remember how he happened to develop so consuming an affinity to it, but he reckons it was during one of his nightly expeditions into the woods to find something worth photographing — something that would set him apart from the others — something to make him stand out from the crowd — when he'd come across the first of the lot.

A dead body. 

"Hey guys, nice to see all of you here again." Hyunjin greets everyone in the room and receives a chorus of greetings in return, to which he smiles before taking a seat for himself.

Jeno wonders why nobody sees how pointless photography clubs are. 

Everyone comes here to sit in a stupid room around a stupid circular table to discuss how to improve their skills and capture something that no one has even seen before, and nobody stops to consider that _no matter how much you try,_ nobody truly will be able to take an _original_ picture because there's always someone who has thought of it before and captured it the exact same way that you just thought of.

_There's no standing out._

The photos you take might be the best of their kind in all of their kind, and yet, there is always going to be someone who has done it before. Someone that set the standard. Someone who defined the _kind_ with their work.

 _What is originality,_ save for a start to a motivational speech for teenagers?

Jeno scoffs quietly to himself, and meets eyes with a boy sitting right across him at the other end of the table. _Zhong Chenle._

The boy smiles, his eyes crinkle at the ends.

Jeno feels like the boy was born to grin.

At least, it was something that had probably been a body, once upon a time. In the present moment, however, it was naught besides a heap of mangled flesh, torn apart and spread out grotesquely over the canvas of the forest floor. A study in blood, veins, and sinew, red and black and only beginning to coagulate as if it was a fresh kill. 

Jeno didn't doubt for a moment that it was.

He remembers springing into action immediately after recovering from the shock of seeing what was definitively the first dead body that he had ever seen in his life. Figuring out the logistics of taking pictures of a person so destroyed beyond redemption and recognition that all there lay in front of him was just carnage… was as unsettling as one would expect for it to be. 

But to Jeno, it is also just as… electrifying.

Chenle is precious in a way that Jeno wants to never let any harm come to him. The boy's favourite thing to photograph are fruits, cats, and sunsets, and as he discovers after some months of being friends with him, Jeno himself. 

He wants to laugh at the irony.

Someone chasing after originality and wanting to capture something that no one has ever thought of before—to have the spotlight on him—to have everyone's attention because _when has admiration ever been a bad thing?_ —and here he meets his unraveling in the form of a boy who likes taking pictures of sunsets tinted pink and sees the world in rose coloured glasses.

He could fall in love with him.

The night as he so fondly remembers was quiet as all nights in a town as small as theirs were wont to be, the woods were dense and dark and sinister like an eldritch being sitting with its mouth open, but you can't see the sharp teeth waiting to tear into an unsuspecting victim— _it's so dark!_ —just waiting for it to step into its jaws, like a corridor of horrors and mirrors with a door that says _Do Not Enter_ in blood, rust, and gore, and yet you cannot help but want to open the door. 

Jeno had dared not to touch a thing. 

Had thought better than to step closer. 

The blood spread around the body like an aura of ichor and iron for the fallen soul was only beginning to dry, and even though Jeno might have been foolishly brave enough to come to the forest in the middle of the night just to find a muse worthwhile, he wasn't daft enough to leave his footprints in the pool of red.

Chenle brings over the food that he's cooked especially for Jeno for the first time and it smells heavenly when Jeno uncaps the lid of the tiffin box.

"Smells amazing, what is it?" He asks as he grabs a pair of chopsticks, and Chenle pauses in his motion to look at him for a long moment with his tender gaze.

"I'm glad you think so, hyungie." He pushes his hair behind his ear. "It's just some pig."

Jeno laughs.

Later when they cuddle in bed, Chenle kisses him, kisses him, kisses him. Murmurs, _"One day I'll make you something that will be just for your eyes."_

Jeno kisses him — his nose, his mouth, the sweet skin of his throat — wonders why he can't stop smelling the fragrance of scarlet metal.

The trees had permitted the moon to cast some light in a sheer blanket of silver incandescence – scantily as it may have been – while the flashes from Jeno's camera – both in sound and light – had only added to the spine-chilling eeriness of the backwoods around him. 

_Click. Flash._

_Click. Flash._

_Click. Flash._

The flashes were reminiscent of lightning and thunder. 

Bright and loud enough to keep him occupied. Bright and loud enough to make him paranoid. It kept him alert, yes, but Jeno wasn't sure if it was the kind of hyper aware he wanted to be. Not in this situation, at least.

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night before, scared out of your mind because you felt someone watching you— or you thought you'd heard a sound? And after that falling asleep had been difficult as anything because you'd keep feeling like you heard scratching outside the door— beside your bed— _dear God I'm not alone in this room._ Or something falling in the kitchen? Or is that a silhouette of someone standing behind your closed door? 

And yet, you'd find yourself stuck in a tussle between falling asleep and staying awake because you want to see and confirm that there's nothing there, but at the same time, what if there is? And all you can think of is _I don't want to die like this. Not here, not now._

That's close to how he was feeling. 

That same unsettling feeling of unease, and that same terror in his blood that skyrocketed every single time that he'd think he'd heard a sound.

Every so often Jeno would jolt — adrenaline boiling his blood, a feeling rooted in fear. In nothing else but primal, primordial, _fear,_ when he'd feel like he heard the rustling of leaves, the crunching of dried husk and timber on the floor of the woods as if something was right behind him, stalking him, creeping up slowly, playing a twisted game of hide and seek— except.

 _Except…_ Jeno wasn't hiding, didn't know he was supposed to, and the consequences of him being found were going to be far, far worse than the child's play, and much, much deadlier.

_Crunch. Tap._

_Crunch. Tap._

_Crunch. Tap._

Oh, no, he'd realised after some seconds had passed him by. It wasn't something stalking him— _No—_ Not something. It was _someone._

That much had become clear as the day in the dark, moonlit night. The gashes on the body — well, on whatever was left of it, truly — were _refined_ as though someone had taken their very sweet time with the kill. 

Perhaps they had, indeed. 

The footsteps that Jeno would keep hearing came in a pattern of familiarity. Whatever creature of the night that was out there, stalking him, preying on him — upon his fear and bravado alike, didn't walk on four legs. It walked just like a being similar to Jeno's own.

The creature that could think was the most dangerous, after all. 

Wasn't it?

Humans were monsters worse than any nightmare could conjure.

In the end Jeno had never paused to count how many photographs he'd had. He'd brisk-walked out the way he'd come, never lifting his gaze from the ground.

He could never use the photographs for what he'd intended either. Unaccounted for, and unfound murder victims didn't make for good portfolios if you wanted to get hired.

Ever since he was child, Jeno had always felt the strangest desire to be struck by unfathomable tragedy. 

To this day, he couldn't explain it. Maybe it was those movies they all grew up watching, maybe it was the air of the closed off small town that made everyone act the way they did. 

Whatever it was, it still did not do much to explain Jeno's affinity to danger.

His collection of photos has only seen an increase over the last few months, and he is surprised to say the least about how no one really cares about the people who end up mangled and torn apart at the other end of Jeno's camera. They talk about them for days. A week at most. And then everyone forgets.

Jeno wonders what is worse, death or oblivion?

He has a fresh batch of _original_ photos that he's coming home with and he's all but vibrating out of his skin with excitement _—itching_ to just get inside the red room and leave them out to develop, excitement skyrocketing when he remembers that the photos from the last batch must be perfect by now.

He hasn't done this in a while, stopped going after that day when someone else witnessed what was meant to be his. Every atom in his being sings with fervour—want, want, want—he lets it get to his head.

_This is your becoming._

He sees the door of his ratty, rented little apartment in the distance and feels the euphoric feeling block his throat with the saccharine scent of blood drying gradually, moving down his throat in a wave thick and slow like molasses.

Jeno wants, wants, _wants._

He wants to _possess,_ to _become,_ to _worship_ and _be taken apart_ —vein by vein, bone by bone—slowly and painfully, made into a masterpiece.

He should be more alarmed when he finds the door open but hasn't he hidden his little hobby from his boyfriend for far too long? He wonders how scared Chenle would be. Or if he'd be proud to know that Jeno _really did succeed!_ He succeeded in taking pictures the kind no one has ever taken before!

Chenle is nowhere in the living room and Jeno hopes— _he hopes very dearly_ —to find Chenle in the red room—hopes to see fear in his innocent boyfriend's eyes—wishes to see something more—because after all this time, how could Chenle never notice?

Jeno needs— _needs, needs, needs—_ to satisfy the question hounding him all this time.

How could someone like Jeno with an appetency for peril never tire of someone like Chenle who seems to rain gullibility and pixie dust wherever he goes?

Jeno knows better than to read a book by its cover.

Jeno knows that there's something rotting just under the surface, laid bare in his line of sight.

He opens the door and Chenle looks right back at him.

Behind him the red room glows.

"Did you hear about the dead body that they found by the edge of the grove?" Someone sitting behind him murmurs and Jeno has to muster all of his self-control to not go visibly tense.

No. _No._

_They couldn't have found it._

_It's not for anyone else but Jeno's pleasure to capture._

Jeno feels something bubble in his gut—anger—envy—rage—it's just his! Those tableaus are for him! They're laid out for him! 

How could someone just come across them—how could _anyone_ see what was only meant for Jeno to witness and immortalise? 

"They said it was an animal attack, didn't they?" Another voice murmurs and Jeno wants to break something. Go out into the night and scream. scream till his lungs give out—ask his cause celebre _how could they_ have left their gift for him for someone else to find?

It was _ours._ _Yours and mine._

"Wild animals on _our_ side of the state?" The first voice scoffs.

Jeno tunes them out. 

Chenle tilts his head and appraises him.

"Come closer, hyungie." He says, smiling like a child looking at his favourite toy. His eyes twinkle, dark as the sky outside, hungry with the thrill of the chase and the lust for the kill, canines glinting under the red glow of the room. "Do you like my artwork?"

 _Feral_ , he looks feral — he is _terrifying_ — in the most charming sort of way, oh he is so, _so_ irresistible Jeno could never imagine not saying yes. 

Chenle beams and Jeno is foolishly infatuated. 

He has never felt so, so in love before.

Hook, line and sinker, he might just sink, and drown, and die.

**Author's Note:**

> this was my first time Ever writing horror/slasher and i'm excited! hope you enjoyed reading. <3
> 
> [twt](https://twitter.com/glitteryongs) | [cc](https://curiouscat.me/glitteryongs) 💌


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